A marriage is risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
We don’t need twenty children anymore
To keep the family line alive,
Or gather up the hay before the rain.
No law demands respectability.
Love can arrive without certificate or cash.
History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.
So what is left to justify a marriage?
Maybe only the hunch that half the world
Will ever be present in any room
With just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
Is to the other an enormous golden lion
Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
After many years, if things go right
Both lion and emptiness are always there;
The one never true without the other.
But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young,
Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed
Curled together on a winter night,
The smell of the other always in the quilt,
The hand set quietly on the other’s flank
That carries news from another world
Light-years away from the one inside
That you always thought you inhabited alone.
The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

In Westminster Abbey
John Betjeman
Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England’s statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady’s cry.

I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that April is National Poetry Month.

My favorite poem? What’s the mood, the season, the circumstance, the weather? Might as well ask for my favorite star in the sky. I’ve written poetry myself in sessions at the Loft and with a private tutor. I approach it as painting, with words as my medium. But I have to confess a certain ambivalence about poetry. Fact is, outside of a context like those mentioned, I don’t write poetry. I admire those people who feel so compelled, who can’t NOT write poetry but I don’t seem to be one of them. As with my painting, I enjoy the process but I am indifferent to doing anything with the finished product.

Likewise I have to say that even though I have lots of poetry in my library, I rarely turn to it for enjoyment. It’s seldom my most urgent choice. There have been periods when I was more engaged with poetry and I may return to that but right now other reading is more compelling to me and I see my time as finite.

I like the writing of Billy Collins, especially poems like “Forgetting” and “The Lanyard”, but I suspect that in some circles Collins is considered too accessible, as if the depth of a poem is measured by its obscurity. I’m also partial to Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

Here’s a poem that, because of its euphonious and alliterative qualities, is fun to recite:

Binsey Poplars Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

When Beauty and Beauty meet
All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
And scattering-bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
After — after —

Where Beauty and Beauty met,
Earth’s still a-tremble there,
And winds are scented yet,
And memory-soft the air,
Bosoming, folding glints of light,
And shreds of shadowy laughter;
Not the tears that fill the years
After — after —

my first english course at the U was survey of english lit, 3 quarters long, which i took to become an english teacher, never really much wanting to teach high lit. i struggled through it, more from interest than aptitude, except for chaucer, donne, goldsmith and a poem here and there. we breezed through poetry from 1880 to WWII, which is when my interest really perked up.
my first teaching job in lindstrom i made a bif hit by teaching poetry from simon and garfunkle and dylan and couple others and lighter more accessible poetry, which is why i think i taught poetry better than most because i didin’t much care for
12th grade enlgish then was survey of english lit. i would look at a few of my classmates, good kids, not very academic or bright or motivated and wonder if any bit of this would impact them. fir a long time my focus was on writing and language and speech and thinking and little of high lit until i started a.p. elgiush

I remember in high school trying to memorize bits of Coleridge and Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but that was extracurricular and self motivated. I remember nothing at all from high school English classes and presume that the quality of instruction was low if it made no impact on someone personally interested as I was. I do remember that one of my English teachers was a football coach who needed to also teach something. I think that tells you everything you need to know about how much English as a subject was valued.

All I remember of HS poetry was that I found it without meaning and not understandable. It had nothing to do with my life at all.

Our teacher, a limited person at best, had no ability to bridge the chasm to make it meaningful, so until my very late 50’s I did not really take an interest in poetry. I still find much 19th century poetry without meaning.

Seventh through 12th grade English was dismal in my school. Two out of six decent teachers slavishly following the textbooks keyed to the standard idea of English curriculum at the time.Two decent, four awful. One of my motivations for teaching English was to try to fix that.

One of the problems with the curriculum, I think in retrospect, was that “official” recognized poetry and poets were always remote in locality and in time. In the ’80s I made friends with a group of poets who were also small press printers and binders. The poetry and the artistry of the book were of one piece. I produced some illustrations for a couple of books and even wrote a short essay for one. It was so relevant and rich an experience that it changed my perspective on poets and poetry permanently. I still have connections to that community. I wish that my exposure to poetry in high school could have been like that.

As you can imagine, Bill, I wasn’t really exposed to “English” poetry in the original language until after I arrived in this country. I should probably qualify that by saying “if you don’t count song lyrics.” By “English” I mean poetry written in English or American. I have such a fondness for poetry, and much of that is rooted in Danish poetry that, unfortunately, I can’t share here. My high school Danish teacher, Fru Nikolajsen, was such a wonderful teacher. It was clear to everyone in my class that she was not so much teaching us, as passing on a love for the written word in Danish. I can still hear her in my mind’s ear, and it still brings a smile to my lips.

I’ve seen references to this a couple of times recently and I think it aptly captures the expressions of grandiosity in the air:

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Here is my favorite Louise Erdrich poem, “Advice to Myself”.Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic – decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

I think Mary Oliver is my most consistently favored poet; some of her poems about the natural world bring me to tears (Peonies). I also like poets who can laugh at the world and our place in it (like Billy Collins).

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like the curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

And one by A.E. Housman:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
’Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
’The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!
— Robert Browning
(According to Wiki, it’s part of something longer…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Passes